Instead of making our children proud of India and its glorious past the NCERT textbook tries to create a suicidal and absolutely false impression in their mind that Indian culture and educational system are inferior to their counterparts in the west. The materials used in the said book tends to make them feel that their ancestors were uncivilised and could be made civilised, truthful and honest through western education.

In this connection an NCERT textbook in History "Our Pasts-III Part 2 for class VIII may be seen.

Before discussing the subject further it is necessary to take a look at the words "our pasts" used in the title of the book. Does any one who know English well ever write or speak "our futures" or "our presents"? But the NCERT writers do not hesitate in distorting historical facts, how can they feel ashamed of grammatical blunder?

The book named above abounds not only in factual errors, but also contains observations which derogatory to the dignity of our motherland. Carrying a photograph of the British clone Macaulay who introduced a flawed educational system here the NCERT textbooks says:

"By 1830s the attack on the orientalists became sharper. One of the most outspoken and influential of such critics of the time was Thomas Babington Macaulay. He saw India as an uncivilised country—that needed to be civilised. No branch of Eastern knowledge, according to him could be compared to what England had produced. Who could deny, declared Macaulay that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. He urged that the British government stop wasting public money in promoting Oriental learning for it was of no practical use." (Pp 97, 98).

The sinister silence of the NCERT writers about the above objectionable remarks of Macaulay about Indian learning make it abundantly clear that they do not want to controvert them, but rather want the students to regard the educational system introduced by Macaulay as superior to Oriental learning.

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(The writer is an Advocate in the Supreme Court may be contacted at A-207, Kalyani Apartments, Sector-06, Vasundhara (Ghaziabad), UP)